Oh wait…I forgot.

I know, I know. Your mouth is watering terribly at the thought of beautiful, glorious turkey tacos. If you’ve eaten them, you’ll understand.

I’ll start with a note: Even though I’ve gained much tastebuddy love from these lovely piles of meat, cheese, and veggies, I cannot call them my own. They belong to Nicole Peeler, who made a pot of meatz madness for a party. She’s even posted the recipe on her blog. If you’re into snark, hit hers up. It’s funnier than mine.

ANYWAY. Wanna know what is possibly the Best Thing about turkey tacos? It’s the easiest recipe ever. Remember how I said that pecan pie was the easiest recipe ever? Well, turkey tacos trump pecan pie. Yeah.

Let’s get down to the tastiness. Here’s all you need (okay, besides cheese, etc, to top). You can use any veggies you like, really. I use onion, red bell pepper, garlic, zucchini, and carrots.

First, chop up all of those tasty, tasty veggies.

Throw your veggies into a big pot with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Brown your ground turkey separately. When both are done, drain the turkey, then dump it into the pot with the veggies, and mix ‘em up.

Then, throw in your packets of taco seasoning and add a couple cups of water, ignoring the amount of water the packets say to add, as turkey tacos end up much wetter than regular tacos.

Let that simmer for ten minutes, or so – or while you wait for your taco shells to crisp in the oven, which is what I do because I always forget to heat them until the last minute.

Finally, stuff ‘em into those shells and put all of it into your face. Then go back for seconds. They also taste awesome as burritos, to which the husband will attest as he is on a super low-carb diet, and nobody makes low-carb taco shells.

I usually serve turkey tacos with some greenery (and in this case orangery), so I popped out some veggies and the ever popular (and surprisingly low-carb) ranch dressing.

Awwwwlz, yeah. Now that’s a meal. It’ll feed a crowd, and it even freezes well! It won a super-unofficial Taco Party vote a year or two ago. Now eat up!

Turkey Tacos

Ingredients:
2 lbs ground turkey
1 zucchini
1 onion
3 carrots
1 red bell pepper
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
3 packets taco seasoning
2 cups water
taco shells and fixins

Directions:

Brown the turkey and cook the veggies in separate pots over medium-ish flame. Put them in at about the same time, and they’ll be done in about the same time.

Drain the turkey, and pour it into the big pot with the veggies. Mix ‘em up a bit, and add the taco seasoning and water. Bring it to a boil, then turn the fire down a bit and let it simmer for a few minutes, or until a good bit of the liquid has evaporated.

Finally, make tacos (or burritos!), and shove as many as you can into your mouth. Because it’s that tasty.

When I was little, I loved to listen to my mom’s record singles on her old record player. “It’s My Party” was probably my favorite.

I remembered this song as I started to put together this blog post.

Because, you know, I like to bake. It’s really one of my favorite things to do. I even started up a little baking business called King Bakes. And I really enjoyed it for a while. I set up a Facebook page and a simple website and started taking orders. King cakes year-round. Except king cakes are temperamental and a bitch to make. Every time I made one to sell, I was a ball of anxiety. That, and each one takes three-and-a-half hours to make. Urrgh. There were also the mini king cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. (I talk about all of this in past tense, but I’m still taking orders.) That was all fine, too, until we went to the Texas Avenue Makers Fair last weekend. If it wasn’t for Palmer, his mom, and my mom, I wouldn’t have made it there in the first place. King cakes are a lot of work, and since they don’t have much of a shelf life, they all had to be baked before and iced the morning of, only to dry out in the heat of the day. Then there was the Great Cupcake Disaster, but I’m not talking about that. The day wasn’t terrible.

That said, I’m never doing it again. Once was certainly enough for me. And after that, I don’t even want to see another king cake.

Which brings me to my point. I love baking, but baking for money made it totally un-fun. Sure, if I worked constantly, I could make decent money, and I might be able to open an actual bakery someday. Except I’d rather be working on my “real” job than this second one. And that’s a problem.

So now I’m back to baking what I want when I want. Today, it’s a pecan pie, and I figured I might share the love.

For some reason, I thought making a pecan pie was complicated. How’d you get the pecans to sit so perfectly on the top of the wonderful sugary goodness? My grandmother always made them, and I didn’t even try until a year, or so, ago. That’s when I learned that pecan pie (and most pies, in general) is the easiest and tastiest thing ever. And what’s funny is everybody uses the same recipe. Think you have a super-secret recipe handed down through the generations? Nope, you don’t. Your Famous Family Recipe is most likely printed on the back of a bottle of good ol’ Karo Syrup. Everybody uses it because it’s the best, and I defy you to prove otherwise.

And as I said, it’s really easy. Here’s all you need:

You really don’t need a mixer for this one. A spoon will do. I just couldn’t help but use the shiny red KitchenAid my husband just got me (have I mentioned that he’s awesome?). Anyway, you throw everything in a bowl

and stir it up.

Then pour in your pecans and give them a stir. Don’t use a mixer for this part or you might hurt the mixer. After that, just pour it on into your pie crust. (I use rolled-up pie crusts from the refrigerated section. They always work well. A note, however: store brand crusts are slightly smaller than name-brand crusts, which causes problems for things like chicken pot pie.)

Then put it into the oven for an hour or so. You’ll end up with a steaming, shifting, bubbling pile of tastiness that needs to cool for two whole hours before you can eat it.

But once those loooooooong two hours are up,

In case you’re not using Karo brand Karo Syrup, here’s the recipe:

Karo Syrup Pecan Pie

• 1 cup Karo® Light Corn Syrup
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon Spice Islands® Pure Vanilla Extract
• 1-1/2 cups (6 ounces) pecans
• 1 (9-inch) unbaked or frozen** deep-dish pie crust

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Mix corn syrup, eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla using a spoon. Stir in pecans. Pour filling into pie crust.
3. Bake on center rack of oven for 60 to 70 minutes (see tips for doneness, below). Cool for 2 hours on wire rack before serving.

See? Baking is soooooo much more fun when the only money involved is to pay for the ingredients. So. Who wants a piece of pie?

Cookie-making season is in full swing! And I’m up to my ears. The library Christmas party is tomorrow, and I volunteered to bake cookies. I have no idea how many people work there, so I figured I should make two batches. And since I’m making two batches, why not make two different types of cookies? Yes! The original plan was to make a big batch of gingerbread mustaches, but I settled on ginger cookies (that’ll be my next post) and chocolate truffle cookies that I call Girl Crack Cookies because they’re ridiculously chocolatey. Somehow, I’m not a huge fan of them – maybe because they’re really intense, so you should eat them slowly, and I tend to cram cookies into my mouth like I haven’t eaten in a month – but I cook them for others on special occasions. Another perk: one batch makes a helluva lot of cookies. Seriously. A lot of cookies.

So! On to the makings.

First, do yourself a favor and gather your ingredients so you’re sure you have everything. Here’s what you need:

Next, melt the chocolate and butter. I use a makeshift double-boiler made out of a saucepan and a heatproof bowl. Simmer (don’t boil!) the water in the saucepan, and let the chocolate melt down slowly, stirring occasionally.

Next, use a stand mixer to whip the eggs and sugar until they’re thick and pale. As a default, whenever I’m told to do something with sugar (it usually involves butter), I turn the mixer to 6 and start a timer for 3 minutes. It worked:

After that, it’s time to our in the vanilla and melted chocolate. Yum!

Once that’s all nice and mixed, whisk together your flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt, then pour it into the mixer with the wet ingredients, and get everything nice and integrated. Then, add even more chocolate. Mhm hmm.

Stir that up, cover up your bowl, and pop it into the fridge for at least an hour. This dough isn’t quite as bad as the gingerbread dough, but it’s pretty hard to deal with when it’s not cold.

Once the hour is up, pull it out, and put small balls onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. I like these cookies to be small, so I use a small cookie dropper, which you can find in kitchen stores and, when you’re really lucky (which I wasn’t yesterday) Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Stick ‘em in the oven for about ten minutes, and you have lots of soft, intensely chocolate cookies. They’re not for the faint of heart!

Here’s the Official Recipe, which I adapted slightly from one on AllRecipes:

Girl Crack Cookies!

Ingredients:

Directions:

Most people find my blog by googling the title of a book and “review,” “summary,” or “paper.” They leave disappointed because my posts in no way resemble papers, contain half-ass summaries at best, and don’t talk about the books enough to be called reviews. I’m not sure what they should be called. Blurbs? My-general-reactions-to-the-few-notable-parts-of-books?

What matters to me is that people who don’t already know me generally don’t come back. Not that my ideal audience should be kids looking to cheat in school, either. I figured I’d take a new approach and add food to the books theme. At least for a bit. As an experiment.

Here’s how the idea started: My recipes are everywhere. I’ve been cooking for a few years, and since I’m bad at losing paper, I keep them in various apps and email. Note the various part. I was trying to find a recipe the other day, and I had to look through email, Evernote, and a couple iPad apps before I found it. I want to be able to find recipes when I want to use them, so I figured gathering them into one app was a good idea. After some researching, I settled on MacGourmet. I used it a few years ago, but since it doesn’t sync well with my various i-devices, I moved on. Now, though, I’m worried more about keeping recipes than having them immediately accessible, and I feel like my database is safest in the hands of good ol’ MacGourmet. It’s still an extra step for me, though, if I want to make something that’s not already on my iPad, specifically Pepperplate (which I love and would pay money for a non-webpage native Mac app) because there’s a bit of cutting and pasting involved. I can deal with that.

So! It’s Christmas season. Christmas is my favorite holiday behind Mardi Gras, and I really get into it. Around 2004, I was in a domestic phase, and I’d never made any serious cookies, so I tried my hand at gingerbread men, and they turned out awesome. I used Martha Stewart’s Basic Gingerbread Cookies recipe, which, at the time, I thought was a huge challenge. Now that I’ve done a bit of baking, it’s pretty easy. Maybe I was a bit freaked out by the sifting?

Here’s a (very unflattering) picture of me sifting the flour in my first attempt:

I’ve made the same gingerbread cookies almost every year since then. The funny thing is that, at that point, I didn’t have my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and I was about to say Don’t Try This with a Hand Mixer because I didn’t think they were powerful enough. This picture proves me wrong:

Ha! These cookies got much easier once my dad and stepmother got me a good mixer. Here’s the result:

On to this year’s cookies! For the first time ever, I’m branching out from traditional gingerbread men – into gingerbread MUSTACHES! I picked up a set of mustache cookie cutters in Houston a couple of weeks ago with these cookies in mind. And, since this is a food blog (post), I’ll show you how I did it!

First, you should head over to Martha Stewart’s site for the recipe. Or, of course, you can scroll down for my adapted recipe, which I think works better for smaller cookies.

First, I gathered all of my ingredients to make sure I had everything. I have a really bad habit of realizing that I’ve forgotten something when I’m already halfway through making it. Then I have to run to the store (which, thankfully, is less than a mile away), etc, etc. So, here’s the pile:

I combined the flour (all six cups of it!), baking soda, and baking powder in a big bowl with a whisk. You see the sifter there, but don’t use it yet even though Martha tells you to!

Then I creamed the butter and brown sugar in the mixer. The recipe says to use the butter at room temperature, but I just soften it in the microwave, and it turns out perfectly. And when any recipe tells me to cream those ingredients, I turn the mixer to six or so and set a timer for three minutes. Done.

That’s about what it should look like. Once it’s all creamy, add the egg and molasses. You’ll end up with a mess like this:

But it needs to be all liquidy since we’re about to put six cups of flour into it. Six cups!

So what about the sifting, you ask? Welllll, to avoid having to clean another dish (I live in an old house with no dishwasher!), I’ve started sifting straight into the mixing bowl. It doesn’t hurt anyone!

I add about half the flour at a time. This is the part where I didn’t think a hand mixer would cut it. Sometimes I’m surprised my stand mixer can deal with this stuff: the dough is thick. Here’s my mixer dealing with it:

And here’s what it looks like once it’s all mixed up:

So now that your dough is ready, you grab some Saran wrap, separate your dough into thirds, and wrap it up. I aim for one-inch-or-so discs. Pop ‘em in the freezer for an hour or so, and you’re good to go. Don’t skimp here: you want this dough to be cold because it’s hard to manage even then.

After an hour (or longer!), your dough should be nice and firm. Still, I usually open up a pack and break off half at a time, putting the other half back in the fridge to keep cool. Have I mentioned that this dough is hard to deal with?

Next comes the complicated part: get a nice fiancé who is willing to do the grunt work. This is a very important step in the cookie dough-rolling process, so don’t skip it. Spread lots of flour over your work surface, and roll out the dough. The recipe says to go for 1/8 inch, but don’t do that unless you want your cookies really hard. Then, start the cutting!

These cookie cutters have stamps on the top side to fill in some hair detail, making them the Most Awesome Mustaches Ever. Here’s the first sheet into the oven:

Last, but not least: the finished product!

These were lots of fun to make, and they’re not hard. It’s just a lot of them – like six or seven dozen. So keep some for yourself and give lots to your friends!

Thanks to Palmer for all of his assistance.

Gingerbread Mustaches!

Ingredients:

Directions:

One of my very favorite things to do is bake cookies. Sadly, a certain dude is worried about his calorie intake, so I’ve agreed to limit my cookie-making to once a week in the new year. But it’s still 2010, and I got in one last batch. What sucks is that they’re not spectacular. They are, though, cookies, and I got to spend a blissful morning baking them.

Peanut butter cup cookies. Like Hershey’s Kiss cookies, but with Reese’s. Really not interesting.

Just in case you are interested, though, here’s the recipe. I’ve adapted it a bit from the one here because the mini-muffin cup idea was a stupid one.

Ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 35-ish miniature chocolate covered peanut butter cups, unwrapped

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda; set aside.
2. Cream together the butter, sugar, peanut butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg, vanilla and milk. Add the flour mixture; mix well. Shape into walnut-sized balls and place each onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
3. Bake at 375 degrees for about 9 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately press a mini peanut butter cup into each ball. Cool on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes or so, then move to a wire rack.

Here’s the carnage:

Once again, I learned that it’s best to read the directions before I start cooking. I discovered halfway into the dough that the recipe called for a mini-muffin pan, which I don’t have. I used a regular cupcake pan for the first batch, but they were so hard to get out that I said forget it and put them on parchment paper. They turned out just fine. They would even make tasty cookies on their own without the Reese’s.

So. Since I promised only to make cookies once a week starting in the new year, and it’s not 2011 yet, I still get to make some more this week, right? OR we can just say the week starts on Sunday. I can see it now: this will be my hardest New Year’s resolution to keep.